July17
Short Measure Men
Thanks to Julian for sending me this brilliant magazine article about short weight and short measure men and the techniques they use to swindle their customers.
Click on the image to enlarge
‘History’ Category
June22
Rats and Cats
The ‘Rats and Cats’ scam first appeared as an advertisement in The Lacon Local News - an illinois newspaper in 1875. The paper printed a small advertisment offering the following deal:-
We are starting with a cat in ranch in Lacon with 100,000 cats. Each cat will average 12 kittens per year. The cats skins will fetch 30 cents each. One hundred men can skin 5000 cats a day.
Now what shall we feed the cats?
We will start a rat ranch next door with 1000,000 rats. The rats breed 12 times faster than the cats. So we will have four rats to feed each day to each cat.
Now what shall we feed the rats?
We feed the rats the carcasses of the cats after they have been skinned. Now get this! We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the skins for nothing!
You have to remember that this was over one hundred years ago when there were more uses for a cat pelt than just dressing Whitney Housten for court appearances.
Turns out I won’t always love you.
The story was picked up by the AP and run across the US for weeks attracting thousands of would be investors to The Lacon Local News.
However, the business never actually existed. Not because it was scam but because it was a hoax. Willis Powell, the editor of the Lacon, was sick and tired of the various get rich quick advertisements that he was forced to print that he decided to create his own joke version.
It was his way of commenting on the phenomenon without directly biting the hand that feeds him. Of course, it blew up in his face and he vowed to never print hoaxes again.
Rats!
April9
Three Card Monte in the Sixties
I met up with an old broad tosser yesterday.
He worked throughout London in the sixties. He came for Italy for the world cup and ended up staying for a few years hitting the race tracks and football games. On derby day, his seven man mob would pull in 5000 pounds between them, making 700 pounds a man.
At the time, you had to ‘buy the police a drink’ to run the game. If the police were honest and you were arrested, the fine was 50 pound because it was easier to convict for ‘obstructing a footpath’ rather than gambling/scamming in public.
He had excellent technique but, surprisingly, was not a fan of the popular US playing cards. He prefers crown and queen slipper. He also preferred the two bend (one concave, one convex) because it keeps the cards flatter.
Magicians and monte fans will be interested to know that his lugs were very small with more of a crease then a bend. He’d bend each corner up creating a small, visible crease. In the context of a game, they looked a little dog eared.
March25
The Human Blockhead
One of my great idols is Melvin Burkhardt, the man that Ripley’s Believe it or Not dubbed “The Human Blockhead”. This classic sideshow stunt was made famous by Melvin through out his life working the midway.
This video of Melvin perform the blockhead in his 80’s is fantastic. He really pounds that nail in there.
March18
Scam from my mum
Big thanks to Jill Johnson (or ‘mum’ as I call her) for letting me know about the Duke of Cumberland hand in bridge/whist.
I remember seeing it in the James Bond film Moonraker not realising it was a real scam.
The Duke of Cumberland, son of George III was cheated using the same technique over two hundred years ago.
The card cheat dealt out the following hands to the four players.
| Partner of the Duke
|
||||||||||||||||||
| West Opponent Defender & Shill
|
East Opponent Dealer & Cheat
|
|||||||||||||||||
| The Duke of Cumberland
|
Without going into the details of the rules of whist vs bridge, in this hand, the Duke and his partner have more points than their competitors owing to the high number of royal cards in his hand.
This lead to him wagering 20,000 pounds on a single hand. That is close to a million dollars in today’s money.
However, it is possible for the East/West players to win all 13 tricks and take the money.
Which is exactly what happened.
“”The idea of the game is to give away all your money as fast as you can.” - Prince George (Blackadder)
February20
Scarne and The Wire
John Scarne had an encyclopedic knowledge of gaming and cheating as well as an incredible brain for figuring out odds and percentages.
His books on dice, cards, three card monte and gaming are in the libraries of all good card cheats and gambling aficionados.
Throughout his career he was often hired by casinos and betting agents to spot cheats and break down scams.
On one occasion he was hired by a bookie who had set up a closed shop book making operation in a penthouse apartment.
His regular customers would spend an afternoon locked in his horse room, plied with drinks and encouraged to bet on horse races with the results of each race would coming in through a single phone line.
The bookie was concerned because a young blonde woman had won over $100,000 in six weeks and he believed she was cheating.
He asked Scarne to figure out how this woman was able to pick the winnings in a locked room. Particularly since this was the 1950s with none of the fancy modern communications technology we could have used today.
Scarne spent the afternoon with the bookie and soon cracked the scam. See if you can figure it out too. Here are the factors:
1) The only way to communicate with people in the room was via a single phone line.
2) Only the bookie would used the phone for taking phone bets and getting results.
3) The announcement of race winners came around five minutes after the race had run. 3) People bet right up until the announcement was made.
4) No one left or entered the windowless room.
If you can figure out the answer, post it below. If you’ve heard the story before, keep mum until others have had a guess.
January18
Free Porn
Remember those old porn dialers?
Back in the dark ages when everyone had dial up modems and burnt witches at the stake, con artists would distribute ‘free porn’ on the internet through dialer programs.
To access the porn, you’d download a program that rang a specific number using your modem.
While the porn was free, the phone number your modem was calling was a premium, high toll number and you ended up getting stung on your phone bill.
That swindle is dead since no one but nannas uses a dial up modem any more. (and nannas don’t download porn, what with being dead from the waist down)
However, the new millenium version hits the Smartphone.
Owners of Iphones who jailbreak their handset, overriding the Apple controls, are being hit with offers of “Free Porn Via Java”.
They download the free, non-approved, application which, then sends a text message to a premium text service.
You end up signed on for a premium account, with no chance of ever being able to unsubscribe because, in most cases, people aren’t even aware the text has been sent.
January6
House of Games (1987)
January5
Soapy Smith Jr. Jr. Jr.
The great (great?) grandson of the famous Old West con man Soapy Smith has a great blog over at Soapy Smith’s Soap Box.
Jeff’s blog is packed full of great historical anecdotes such as this greats story about Charles Baggs and the fake safe:
…always had his false safe, an enormous affair made of wood with a silver knob, beautifully painted and labeled ‘Hull’s Patent.’ It looked exactly like a heavy iron safe. One day Doc’s office in Deadwood caught fire, and he surprised everybody by running down stairs with the massive safe on his back. … The thing cost him as much as $100. Of course he wanted to save it. He had it made of wood so he could fold it up and carry it around easily from place to place. You know every time the bunco man catches a big ‘sucker’ he moves his office. When the ‘sucker’ next comes around he don’t find anything but an empty room. Besides, Doc used to keep his money and valuables in that same old wooden chest. No burglars would venture to tackle its massive sides, and it was as secure as it would have been in any vault in the country.
~St. Louis Globe-Democrat. March 8, 1882.
January1
Top Ten Scams of the Decade #4
Number Four: Mortage Refinancing
The noughties was the decade in which the economy imploded (or exploded, I’m not an economist and this technical terms confuse me).
As best as I can tell, a bunch of people bought houses they couldn’t afford using money they borrowed from banks who didn’t have the money to give. The people lost their houses, the banks lost their money and everything went tits up. (stop me if I’m going too fast.)
This is where the con artists came in, picking over the bones of the economy. Dodgy characters began offering people to remortgage their homes. Victims, desperate to save their homes signed anything shoved in front of them and ended up losing everything.
Now, as the economy is slowly improving, new morgage scams are being discovered all the time. A Sydney couple have been arrested this month for stealing identities of homeowners to get fake mortgages. $150 million is believed to have been swindled.
Tomorrow: Identity Theft